Planting Liberally

My wife has recently started a blog called Looking for Faith. The blog guides "those seeking a fresh start in their spiritual journey" by providing them with Unitarian Universalist reflections on important theological concepts. Each week she addresses a new concept; so far she's tackled "New Beginnings", "Prayer", and "Faith". I've known this site was coming for some time, at least two or three months, and I had great hopes that it would be a big success. Now that it's here, it's surpassed all of those expectations by a long shot. The writing is sincere, humble, personal, and accessible. On top of all that, it invites readers to consider Unitarian Universalist writings from a broad range of sources, including sermons, podcasts and poems. To all those asking the question, "I know I'm spiritual, but I don't have a spiritual home; where do I go?", this blog provides an answer. A cross-post to Street Prophets also yielded a link to Abdur Rahman's Corner, a blog which appears to be doing similar things with Islam - that is, approaching important religious concepts from a Muslim point of view. The UCC's have been adopting this approach for a couple of years as well, as part of their Still Speaking initiative. The denomination's i.ucc website launched last year, and was well-received. It allows church members and non-members to discuss topics of spirituality in an environment moderated by a UCC minister. What is the relevance of all these online efforts? They are all working to invite the "unchurched" into a religion via a liberal worldview. In the course of their writing, they invite their readers to consider the liberal worldview as it pertains to their spiritual lives. Such an invitation can be convincing (by encouraging readers to consider a point of view which they had not yet encountered), or it can be strengthening (by reinforcing latent beliefs a reader may already have). It remains to be seen whether a strong religious bond can be built through online interaction; if I had to venture a guess I'd say "probably not". What these sites do is help the reader "get to the door" - they invite the reader to join an flesh-and-blood community; hopefully that experience leads to genuine and long-lasting life changes. Online religious organizing efforts like these have two major advantages over traditional on-the-ground religious organizing. They are cheap to start and easy to maintain. Moreover, they are more likely to capture the ears of young audiences. Surveys show that young audiences are the most likely to be secular or "spiritual but not religious", and are therefore the most likely to be receptive to these ideas (warning: PDF). We need more, much more, of this sort of effort. Liberal religious organizing initiatives are the only way we can hope to reinvigorate liberal religious denominations, and online approaches are a promising way to jump-start such initiatives. Full disclosure: In case it's not glaringly obvious in the above, I'm married to the founder of Looking for Faith.